


what could possibly go wrong?

by judypoovey



Series: the universe is shaped exactly like the earth [2]
Category: Guardians of the Galaxy - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Human, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Gen, Kraglin struggles with babysitting, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-03
Updated: 2017-07-03
Packaged: 2018-11-22 21:07:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,987
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11388405
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/judypoovey/pseuds/judypoovey
Summary: Sometimes, Kraglin thinks he's getting the hang of the whole quasi-step-parent thing.He's really, really not.





	what could possibly go wrong?

**Author's Note:**

> This is the light-hearted sequel fic because the Nebula fic I want to write is slow coming and more serious. So enjoy!

Kraglin woke up one morning, expecting a pleasant day. Yondu’s house (he still hesitated to call it ‘his’ even though had been living there close to two months) was quiet. Not the kind of quiet that preceded trouble, but just the kind of quiet that meant that it would be a good day.

He was so wrong.

He woke up by himself most of the time – either he had to go to work before Yondu had woken, or he was sleeping in and couldn’t be roused if world war 3 erupted outside. So he wasn’t surprised when Yondu was in the kitchen making himself a sandwich. It was a routine.

“Mornin’,” he said.

“Bout fuckin’ time you got up,” Yondu said, not turning to greet him. Routine.

“Where’s everybody?” he asked.

“Movies.”

“Even Nebula?” Nebula had come to stay in the house a few weeks ago, and while she drifted between using Peter’s old room and sleeping in her sister’s dorm up the road, she was a fairly frequent fixture, and had been rightfully withdrawn and surly the entire time.

“Even Nebula.”

She had not confided in them what had brought her to them yet, and Kraglin expected it was a story for another time.

“I got a proposition for you,” Yondu said, sitting down and taking a bite out of his sandwich while Kraglin poured a cup of lukewarm coffee and sat next to him.

“What’s that?”

“Most every year, me and Tullk take an all-weekend fishing trip. When the boys were younger, I’d take ‘em, but now they’re…well. You’ve met ‘em.”

Kraglin didn’t like where this topic of conversation was going. Either he was being expected to sit on a lake in the cold for three days or…

“So we’re going next week, and I need you to watch ‘em.”

“No!” He shoulda known today wasn’t going to be good. “Hell, Pete can watch ‘em!”

“ _Can_ he?”

No, really, he probably couldn’t. Plus, he was probably busy.

“Hovat, then?” A pleading edge was getting into his voice. Drax’s girlfriend was more sensible than her boyfriend by about thirty times, and very fond of Groot and Mantis.

Yondu wasn’t amused by his pleading. “Ya can’t skate by for the next – ” He was mentally counting. “Five years. You gotta watch ‘em alone at least _once_.”

Kraglin knew that. He could concede that. Their relationship had taken on an edge of seriousness and, gag, emotional sincerity that he hadn’t expected considering all of the variables, and if he was going to be a permanent fixture in Yondu’s life, which he wanted to be, he also had to be a permanent fixture in the lives of the weird band of misfits that called him dad. He got it. It was never a position he’d ever thought he’d be in. There was an adjustment period.

Luckily they were all but grown. He didn’t have the stomach to be around actual children. He could do this, right?

“Fine.”

“Friday through Sunday. Can you handle it?”

Kraglin sighed loudly. “Yeah. Just let me call outta work.”

\--

First thing Friday morning, Yondu packed up and left.

Kraglin figured he had two options here: go next door and wait out the weekend, checking to make sure everyone was alive sporadically and try to bribe them into not telling him he’d done so, or go through with it and be a responsible, caring life partner.

He guessed he was stuck with the latter, when Yondu hugged him and gave him a half-muttered ‘thanks’ that he would have felt terrible to betray. He was very attached to that ‘ _thanks’_.

All of them were at school, so really he didn’t have to worry about them for several hours yet. He passed the day by napping in front of the TV (he would call it ‘mentally preparing’ if anyone asked), and only woke up when the unmistakable noise of three teenagers echoed through the house.

And they were accompanied by Peter. Great!

“What’re you doin’ here?” he asked.

“Drax wants the dorm to himself this weekend and Nebula is staying with Gamora, so I thought I’d come see my family,” he said, a shit-eating grin on his face.

“Did Yondu send ya to spy on me?”

“I am appalled you would suggest such a thing!” he said, clutching his chest in mock-anguish. Then he dropped the face and shrugged. “He offered me twenty bucks, but those other things are also true.”

“I’ll give you forty bucks to tell him I did a great job no matter what happens,” Kraglin said, immediately pulling out his wallet. “Twenty upfront and twenty when you prove your worth.”

“Hey! What about us?” Rocket demanded. “We wanna get paid off!”

“Too bad, if I had that much cash on me, I wouldn’t live here,” he joked.

“What’s for dinner?” Mantis asked, still politely interested in being paid off.

“Whatever delivers. Your dad left money on top of the fridge, order it whenever.”

They bickered over pizza vs sandwiches vs pho and settled on pizza. He could’ve gone back to Yondu’s room, watched something by himself until it was time to convince them to go to sleep, but instead he stayed in the living room with them as they set up the video games.

Groot turned to Kraglin and extended a controller.

He hadn’t quite mastered sign language yet, so his level of communication with Groot was fairly rudimentary (mostly finger-spelling and a lot of ‘hey hey slow down’), but the question was clear.

“Sure, I’ll play,” he said, taking it. The boys all played while Mantis cheered for them (mostly Peter). Kraglin had never been much of a video-game guy. That was basically blasphemy for someone who had come up in the 90s, but he had spent more of his leisure time skateboarding and stealing people’s lunch money than parked in front of a TV. Parking in front of a TV would mean that his dad had gotten off his ass for more than ten minutes, anyway.

So the first few rounds, he got his ass thoroughly kicked, but after a little while he was starting to get the hang of it, and by the time dinner arrived, he was no longer embarrassing himself. As they shut the game off, Groot offered him a high-five.

It was actually kind of a nice feeling.

Eating dinner, the TV blaring in the background as Mantis valiantly attempted to do her homework, but found herself distracted by Peter’s loud stories about how “awesome college parties are” to his brothers. Kraglin, who had a keen ear for bullshit, could tell that he was just repackaging recollection of one party into several smaller anecdotes so that it sounded like he had been partying every weekend instead of the one time that he and Drax crashed some football party they hadn’t been invited to.

He'd let him keep up with the bullshit.

Being more interested pizza and less in the chatter ended up being his downfall, when the conversation turned to him and he was too busy not listening to notice until it was too late.

“So,” Peter said, and Kraglin only half-heard him. “What is it you’re doing with our dad?”

Kraglin could leave. He was an adult. But leaving meant getting pestered. “I figured you’d know by now.”

“Yeah but like…what are your intentions? He’s not rich. Or particularly good-looking. Or nice. So…”

The temptation to take that comment to its natural conclusion was incredibly strong, but there were children present and so he just raised an eyebrow. “I don’t know, I guess we just like each other.”

“Like – you like him for his _personality_?”

“Might be.”

Peter and Rocket exchanged a look. “Wow. That’s a first.”

“So are you gonna like, get married or somethin’?” Peter asked.

Kraglin choked on his drink, and struggled to recover. He hadn’t given it a single thought, but the oddly naïve way that Peter had said it made it seem like such a simple thing. “I don’t think that’s legal here, Pete.”

“But if it were?”

“It’s a little too soon to tell,” was all he felt okay saying. Denying it would get back to Yondu in the wrong context, and so would affirming it. He didn’t want to deal with the potential fallout that came with being _committal_.

If this was the worst thing that happened all weekend, he’d probably get out of it okay, though.

He was pretending to read a book he had found around the house while the teenagers settled into food comas around him, barely looking at the TV. Rocket and Groot were telling Peter about school.

He overheard snips of it.

“ – is always messing with me. Treats me like shit. I just wanna rip his face off,” Rocket was growling.

That got Kraglin’s attention, and he caught a little bit of what Groot was signing to his concerned older brother – ‘treats me like I’m stupid’ – and his heart sank a little. Did Yondu know they were getting bullied?

“You ever get picked on?” Rocket asked, rounding on him.

“Uh, not really.” He wasn’t going to mention that he had been a dick to people in high school. “I kinda dropped out, anyway. Avoided all that.”

They went back to their conversation, by all appearances satisfied. As the four of them started to pass out on the couch, he thought maybe this wasn’t as hard as Yondu made it out to be. He thought he’d done okay, at least.

So he retreated to Yondu’s room – yes, technically their room, but he still struggled to call it that – and passed out pretty early for a Friday night. It wasn’t like he could go anywhere, knowing Yondu had bribed them to snitch on him.

\--

Saturday, of course, things started to fall apart.

He woke up and Mantis was crying. The boys were making breakfast and completely ignoring the crying girl in the middle of the kitchen, which was weird, even for them. They were a-holes, not complete dicks.

“What’s –”

“ _Don’t_ ask her!” Peter warned.

Kraglin rolled his eyes. “What’s wrong, Mantis?”

“Did you know swans can be _gay_?” she asked, before she sobbed again.

“This is why you’re crying?”

“We told you, dude.”

She nodded.

Reaching out, he awkwardly patted her on the top of the head and went about fixing himself some eggs, trying not to dwell too much on the mind of a teenage girl.

“We were going to go walk around for a bit. Is that okay?”

Yondu hadn’t said anything about them not leaving the house, so he waved them off. “Have fun and don’t get arrested.”

That was, apparently, far too much to ask. Kraglin was outside, cleaning the accumulation of garbage out of his car (the car Yondu had bought him, so maybe not really his), when he looked up and saw Officers Dey and Saal marching the shame-faced quartet up the stairs.

“Fuckshitdamn,” he muttered, throwing down his cigarette and walking over. “The fuck did they do?” he demanded.

“Is their guardian not here?” Saal asked in that imperious, smug voice he always used. They had, unsurprisingly, not been friends in high school.

“Outta town for the weekend, I’m watchin’ them,” he said.

“He lives here!” Mantis offered with a smile.

“Playing house, Obfonteri?” Saal asked, not overly malicious, but still too smug.

“Somethin’ like that, what happened?”

“Just a scuffle. Nothing serious. Figured it wasn’t too far of a walk to make sure none of them tried to retaliate,” Officer Dey said. “We’ll leave you to it.”

“Alrighty, have a great day enforcing the will of an uncaring military state,” Kraglin responded, unable to resist the jab. Fortunately, they didn’t care. He’d gotten the shit kicked out of him for tamer insults, but Dey and Saal ranked among the more laid back cops in the city. Maybe the only cops? He hadn’t seen many since he arrived here. “What the fuck, you guys?”

“It was that Ayesha girl! Her and her freaky identical lackey picked a fight with us! We didn’t do anything!” Peter insisted, holding his hands up.

“Also we don’t have to answer to you,” Rocket said, but he seemed to be the only person who thought that, because no one else said anything about it.

“Yondu left me in charge, you have to answer to me. Frankly, I don’t give a shit what you do, but could you at least have the decency to not get caught?”

“She made a big scene, not us,” Peter said.

“Fine. Go inside. No more leaving today.” He watched them march inside and went back to cleaning out his car. When he was done, they were scattered through the house, all doing their own things. Peace and quiet for a little while.

Yondu chose then to call.

“Hey,” he said.

“House still standin’?” Yondu asked, sounding a little drunk, which is probably what he was.

“And everyone in it. I can’t believe you paid Peter to spy on me.”

“He told you? Damn waste of money.”

“He’s not exactly a master of evading interrogation, no,” Kraglin agreed. “Havin’ fun?”

“Yeah. Be back pretty early tomorrow though.”

“Can’t wait,” he said, in lieu of anything too sentimental like ‘I miss you’ or ‘save me from your spawn’.

“See ya.”

Conversation over.

“You guys are masters of romance,” Rocket snarked as he walked by with a suspicious number of power tools. Kraglin had learned quickly not to question it – not because Rocket wouldn’t answer, but because Rocket’s answers tended to be terrifying.

“Hey, when you get to be my age, you appreciate the value of not feelin’ obligated to rattle off a bunch of romantic bullshit every time you speak,” he said, though he couldn’t stop himself from getting a little pink around the ears.

“If you wasn’t so obviously infatuated I’d worry,” Rocket countered.

Kraglin went even redder, and decided to sit outside and smoke, needing a plausible excuse for not being inside when Rocket blew up whatever he was going to blow up.

He was comfortable in his relationship, he was secure. Rocket was just nosy and overly blunt and it became trying after a while.

They managed to behave themselves into dinner, where the table full of sandwiches and chips became a war zone for who got what and who had to share and blah blah blah normal sibling bullshit. Kraglin was grateful that he’d never had siblings, though his housemates had been nearly as bad.

Or worse, in some ways. Hygiene, for instance. Gef never met a shower he trusted.

Once the in-fighting had died down, with Mantis hoarding far too many bags of chips for her size and appetite, they were back to watching movies and being cooperative siblings. Thank god.

“Maybe I should just drop out,” Rocket said moodily, talking about school again.

Kraglin struggled to swallow his next bite of sandwich. “What? No!”

“I mean you did and you turned out just fine!” he exclaimed. “I already know all of this stuff anyway.”

“Turned out fine?” he repeated, feeling stupid. “I have a neck tattoo!”

“He does have a point there,” Peter said.

“Your dad would kill you if you dropped out, and then he’d kill me for influencing you. Save both of our lives and just don’t ever say anything about that again,” he said firmly. He didn’t know where they got this from – if you said anything to them, they took it as a suggestion. He was exhausted already. It was barely 8 PM.

\--

Sunday couldn’t dawn fast enough. Kraglin almost missed work, that’s how tired he was of the bickering and the shouting and the stomping.

So of course when he woke up that morning, it was to a cacophony or bickering, shouting, and stomping.

“What the fuck is goin’ on?” he asked.

“Look what she did to my car!” Peter wailed, throwing the door open. His station wagon was sitting in the driveway in front of Kraglin’s car, the tires slashed and copious amounts of gold glitter thrown into the seats and onto the paint.

“Aw, shit,” he said.

“I’m gonna call her!”

“Do not.”

“Why not? She vandalized my car!”

“Didn’t you start a rumor she was sleeping with her brother?” Rocket asked.

“It’s not a rumor! And I’m not sure he’s her brother. I mean. So, okay, that is a thing I did. But this is totally unfair!” Peter was red-faced and shouting now, totally oblivious to how he might have brought this upon himself.

“We might need to have a talk about how you treat the women you sleep with, Peter,” Kraglin said, draping an arm over his shoulder and pulling him in, unable to resist a malicious grin. It was time for the tormented to become the tormentor.

“I am so respectful of women! This one is exceptionally awful! I only started that rumor because she told everyone that I…” The way he faltered was explanation enough.

“You don’t need to finish that sentence. I’m not saying you need to be nice to the weird, pro-eugenics twin-banger,” he said. “But I’m saying your revenge should probably be less showy than this,” he said, gesturing to the car.

“Ahhh, I see.” Peter did not see, and that was obvious.

“What the fuck happened?” a familiar voice snapped.

“So, uh, remember that Ayesha chick?” Kraglin responded, turning to Yondu and shoving Peter towards him to explain himself.

“I leave you alone for two and a half days and this is what I come home to,” he muttered.

“I guess you’ll just have to never do that again,” Kraglin suggested.

“He did a great job!” Peter blurted out.

Kraglin pulled out his wallet and gave him the twenty he’d promised.

“I’ll give you sixty to tell me the actual truth,” Yondu said.

Peter had the decency to look at least a little conflicted before he took the cash.


End file.
